Scott Mautz  
You are enough, and you don't have to take on everything by yourself.

Jeff Ma  
Hello and welcome to love as a business strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business but we want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from, and we believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I'm your host. Jeff MA and as always, I'm here to have conversations and hear stories from real people about real businesses and real life. My guest today is Scott Mautz. Scott is a former senior executive of Procter and Gamble where he successfully ran several of the company's largest multi billion dollar businesses. He's the author of four multi award winning best selling books, including his latest, the mentally strong leader. Build the habits to productively regulate your emotions, thoughts and behaviors. Scott is faculty on reserve at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business for executive education, and he's also a popular course instructor on LinkedIn learning, where his courses have been taken over one and a half million times. Scott has been named a CEO thought leader by the CEO executive Guild and a top 50 leadership innovator by inc.com where his column drew nearly 2 million readers a month. And I am honored and privileged to have Scott here on the show today to chat with us just a little bit about mentally strong leaders. So Scott, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Scott Mautz  
Thanks for having me here. I'll have to meet that guy you just described. Yeah, sounds kind of cool.

Jeff Ma  
It's always weird to have all our accomplishments laid out. I

Scott Mautz  
know, oh, it makes it makes me cringe. But, you know, hey, the people got to know I know what I'm talking about, so sure

Jeff Ma  
absolutely they can, you know, Google, you there's a way. I didn't even cover everything the Google has a lot more in store. So thank you so much for making the time to be here today. I have a question I like to start with, out of genuine curiosity for myself as a human. Scott, what is your passion and how did you find it?

Scott Mautz  
My passion, unquestionably, is helping others become better versions of themselves, which I bet, Jeff, you share a lot of that DNA strand, just given the nature of your very show. And I learned that about myself growing up in the corporate world. Spent, you know, multiple decades in the corporate world and just just finding that I was always drawn, of course, to building the business and building results and doing better than we did last year. But I was even more drawn to the human side of that, which is why I'm so drawn to this podcast. And I'm a fan of this podcast, you know, the the ability to help people become better versions of themselves by introducing tools, introducing insights that help them to get there. And I've been doing that speaking about, you know, in that area, and teaching workshops and keynotes and writing books about, you know, that area, of helping people to become better versions of themselves for quite a long time now. So it's a passion that's kind of carried through my life

Jeff Ma  
amazing. And there was a there's a slew of things that I wanted to talk to you about, and we had to narrow it down a little bit. And so here we are to dive into mental strength of the mentally strong leader. And I'd love if you could kick us off with what that even means, by your definition. What is a mentally strong leader? 

Scott Mautz  
Yeah, I'll define it, and then I think it'll become pretty clear how it ties into, you know, love and the theme of the podcast. So mental strength is by definition, the ability Jeff to regulate your emotions, your thoughts and your behaviors productively for productive outcomes, no matter the circumstances, even in the face of adversity. So said another way it's managing internally so you can lead externally and and here's the thing, Jeff, I think most of us, I think most of your listeners, know intuitively that if they want to be successful at work and in life, they have to be able to self regulate their emotions, their thoughts and behaviors. But this just in it's really hard to do that. It's like really hard to regulate your emotions, your thoughts and your behaviors in a productive way. But you know, the good news is, through the mentally strong leader, the book that I've been working on for years, in the new book, it's the good news is, is that if you can build the habits behind increasing your mental strength, it's actually like training your brain for achievement. It's the cheat code for achievement, and I'll talk a little bit later about the research that has proven the connection between mental strength and achievement. It might be surprising that the extent of it to some of your listeners, it's what makes mental strength the leadership and self leadership superpower of our. Times because it is so hard to self regulate your emotions, thoughts and behaviors, but when you can do it, it is so clearly linked to achievement, it's what makes it a superpower. And I'm so excited to be able to talk to you about it today,

Jeff Ma  
absolutely. And I'm going to follow up that definition by diving deeper with another question of, can you define and give example of what you mean by self regulate? So we can be more clear when you say you self regulate. What does that actually look like? Yeah,

Scott Mautz  
I think we can go a layer below. So you know, if mental strength is the ability to regulate your emotions, your thoughts and your behaviors to you know, for productive outcomes, my research has shown that there are six core mental muscles for you to self regulate that equate to mental strength. Those six mental muscles that equate to mental strength and thus achievement are fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision making, goal focus, the ability to stay focused on your goals despite distractions and messaging as a leader, the ability to message and exude a positive messaging track and to exude a quality of engagement and presence in your intent and integrity to your presence and to your intent as well. So by self regulating these core mental muscles, you increase your mental strength. And here's the thing, so that people aren't intimidated when they hear that. So, you know, you ask, Well, Scott be you know, drill down on self regulation. And I'm telling you, well, there's six core mental muscles that you self regulate. I don't want your listeners, Jeff to feel intimidated by that, because think about the analogy of going to the gym. When you go to the gym, you don't go to the gym every time. Jeff with a plan of working on every single muscle in your body all the time, every day, right? I mean, that'd be overwhelming. Wednesday might be leg day. Thursday is, you know, stomach sit up day and shoulders day and so on. It's the same with training your brain for achievement. By working on your core mental muscles. You don't have to do them all at once. You can work on them as needed, building the habits that underlie each one of those and here's a cool part about the mentally strong leader. The book you can take. You start if you get the book, you start by taking a self assessment, a mental strength self assessment. It's the results to this. It's a kind of a way that you can love yourself, speaking of the theme of the podcast, right? Because you get the the mental strength self assessment. It's about 50 questions. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes. It's in the book. You get an overall mental strength score, as well as scores and how you do for each mental muscle that I was talking about earlier, fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision making, goal, focus and messaging. Then, armed with that understanding of where you stand in your mental strength, you can then build your customized mental strength training program, choosing to level up which muscle is right for you and is most appropriate for you, so that you can thus increase your mental strength in your ability to achieve so perhaps, you know Jeff, maybe you're a really confident guy, but maybe, you know making this up, maybe you look at decision making and think like, Man, I could be a lot more decisive in my life. Well, you know, that's the muscle that you have to build. So in the book, you actually get all kinds of tools back in the book, the mentally strong leader that to choose from, they're going to allow you to strengthen that particular muscle over 50 plus proven tools in general. So that's what I mean by self regulating and using the tools to build a mental muscle. That's right for you to increase your mental strength. Does that make sense? Jeff,

Jeff Ma  
it does. I guess my follow up is, what does it look like when these things are not self regulated? I guess like, what does that mean like when, when you're not practicing these things? What does that look like,

Scott Mautz  
yes, that means that you haven't made a habit of doing them. You may do them inconsistently for let's, let's pick the confidence muscle. For example, you may show confidence at times or false confidence. You may project confidence because you know you need to as a leader, but deep down inside, you know that there's some things that are really just holes are being punctured in your self confidence. So, so the answer is to actually build the habits. Jeff, so that you don't experience those moments. Is you don't experience, I should say, as many moments of let down, you can build the habits behind it. And here's here's how that works in the mentally strong leader. I have spent a very long time understanding habit, building science and the 50 plus tools that are in the mentally strong leader that help you build your mental strength, they're all based on habit. Building Science in three ways. For example, number one, the first, most important way to build a habit is to get repetitions, just like when you go to the. Gym and you want to, you know, build your your let's do curls to build your arm muscles, right? You got to do repetitions. It's the same with mental strength training. You need repetitions, or you need systems and frameworks that will help you get those repetitions almost automatically. So number one rule of habit building science. It's in the book The Miley strong leader for each of the 50 habit building tools, those tools all show up as systems or frameworks that you can follow so you have the habit of doing it. Second habit building science teaches us that habits never get formed if you don't take the first small step in starting that habit. So every tool all, all 50 plus in the mentally strong leader, is equipped with a section titled your first small step to indicate exactly how you should get started in building that habit. And then third, embracing habit, building science. We know there's an inflection point when you're trying to start a new habit. What happens in moments of weakness? And there's a section for every tool over 50 plus habit building tools titled in moments of weakness, so you know what to do. You know following through on the confidence. Example, again, when you feel your confidence breaking down in that moment and you want to use a tool to help you build it, what do you do when in that moment of weakness, specifically, what do you do? And there's advice on how to do that when you can feel that exam, for example, confidence crumbling. So a long answer to your question. But what it looks like when you're not practicing mental strength is you're not habitualizing it. You're doing it intermittently at best, or maybe you're breaking down altogether. And by building the habits to do that, you can avoid that altogether.

Jeff Ma  
That sounds great. I think there's 50 of them, but maybe sticking with confidence. Maybe, could you give an example of like, what kind of habit or what kind of system are we setting up to help us work on confidence?

Scott Mautz  
Yes. So for example, in the mentally strong leader, if, let's say in your self assessment score again, you know there's the six mental muscles of fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision making, goal, focus and messaging. You discern, wow. Confidence is something I really want to do better at. The good thing is, is even in the chapter that's all about building the confidence habit, it's all about building that confidence muscle. Jeff, there's a menu of options for you to choose from. Couple of examples from that chapter on building confidence. There's two tools, very powerful that are about, number one, monitoring your relationship with self doubt, and number two, a tool for monitoring your relationship with yourself, and I'll explain both very quickly. Notice I want you to think of the power of that for a second. I'm asking the listener to monitor their their relationship with self doubt, because that presumes that a relationships relationship exists for all of us. Guess what? Jeff it does. We've seen in my research that even in the most mentally strong people that have the ability to love themselves the most, even those people, self doubt is present, even if it's buried deep down and and I have a spectrum, a continuum in there that goes all the way from, you know, measuring your your relationship with self doubt, to where you're overconfident and self doubt is buried and you're not being honest about it, all the way to fear of failure, paralyzing you, and then in between, being able to be perfectly confident and knowing how to embrace healthy doubt. So there's a tool in the mentally strong leader that allows you to understand where on the self doubt continuum you are, and it gives you advice on how to manage where you might be on that continuum. Another example in the confidence chapter is monitoring your relationship with yourself. And interestingly enough, Jeff, it turns out there are many pockets of ways that we fail to accept ourselves which eat away at our confidence. So in the mentally strong leader in the confidence habit section, if you want to build that muscle, you'll find the self acceptance scale, which there are breaches and self confidence that range all the way from you know, first of all, you're doing pretty good. You're self accepting on one side of the scale, and it's the highest form of self regulation, because you're regulating your emotions, your thoughts and your behaviors to feed your self acceptance of yourself, the self love that you feel. On the other side of the scale, not so good, where regulation is poor, where you're not doing a good job of regulating your emotions and thought behaviors, lies this evil, insidious thing called imposter syndrome, where we don't even accept ourselves for what we accomplished, who we are, why we are, where we're at, that we deserve it. And in between self acceptance, which is good on self you know, on that scale, the imposter syndrome, which is bad, there's a whole list of litany of things on a scale, Jeff, that impact you. Our confidence, such as approval seeking behavior where we've stopped chasing authenticity and we've started chasing approval, like comparing to others, which is something I still have to work on Jeff and I teach the opposite of that, right? I teach this stuff, and I still work on making irrelevant comparisons to others that don't matter to me. Right. Moving along the scale, we could engage in negative inner chatter and even more insidious form of self confidence, beating ourselves up over and over again with negative self talk. We might even move to the feeling of, I'm not enough. And if I could tell one thing to your listeners right now, within this self accepted scale, I'm not enough as one of the most insidious places to land on that scale of all, because it presumes that we're not accepting ourselves as enough. And I'd like to tell you, Jeff, I'd like to tell you all, all your listeners right now that you are enough, that you don't have to take on everything by yourself. And I think that's worth repeating. I want to look right into the camera for those that are watching this, you are enough, and you don't have to take on everything by yourself. And in the mentally strong leader, depending on what your source of lack of confidence is on that self acceptance scale, whether it's you're seeking approval too often, you're comparing to others, you're engaging in negative inner chatter. You don't feel like you're enough, you have imposter syndrome. There are specific tools to help you overcome each one of those, it all starts with understanding, where do you fall on that relationship with yourself and your acceptance of yourself?

Jeff Ma  
Powerful stuff, and I think it just fundamentally jives so well with with what I understand and believe as well. But my question kind of follows me into this path around self awareness. I think, I think a lot of what you mentioned requires, at least in my experience, a certain, you know, above average to do well. I feel like you need this above average sense of self awareness. Not that not everybody has, sometimes or for one reason or another, we could be lacking it in certain areas that blind us to these issues. So I'd love your take on kind of how we properly go about this journey. It sounds like a lot of these traits and paths to success require us first to kind of part the clouds and be able to see a little more clearly about ourselves and how we're perceived by others.

Scott Mautz  
Thank you so much for that, Jeff, because it gives me a chance to to reinforce that. It All Begins with Self Assessment, and of course, Jeff, you know, I hope people buy the mentally strong leader, because I'm so proud of the decades of work that has gone into it, and the powerful feedback I'm getting about how potent it is. And I hope they take the self assessment, and even if not, it's the spirit of assessing yourself first, but, but for example, in the book, there's a, you know, I was talking about this earlier, the mental strength self assessment that helps you get honest with where you're at in your mental strength levels. And I encourage you in the write up of the assessment to be honest with yourselves. But I have a kind of a protected in there as well. For example, I have the the assessment in front of me here. I put on my readers here, because I'm getting to that age now where I need them. Jeff, it started happening a few years ago, and even in some of these questions that I'm talking about, I'm encouraging the user or the reader to also enroll others in their thoughts about how they're answering that question. So let me just find an example for you here right now. Again, I'm looking at the mental strength self assessment. So let's see here. Let's just find, let me just pick one good one here. So you know, for example, in the in the mental strength self assessment, when we get to decision making, right? And you're going through the decision making set of questions, and there's a good set in there. And let's say you get to to this, this discussion, how often would you or others say you're decisive? So in the assessment, there's built in this the safeguard of and an encouragement of be honest in assessing yourself. And even if you're not self aware, the assessment will help you get there and to make sure that you don't cheat in your answers you're not as honest as you can be, enroll those that know you and trust you and believe you and know you may be better than yourselves, and ask them, how would they respond on a scale of one to five? So for example, how would you or others say you're decisive? You can answer from one to five, from never? Or to always Now, Jeff, maybe you would answer that one way, but your best friend who knows you very well would maybe answer it differently, and in discussing that assessment with people who know you well, you can elevate your self awareness. 

Jeff Ma  
Yeah, and I love that approach. I asked that question because as I look at the different parts that you're looking to build habits for the parts that you're trying to regulate, I think it talks about emotions, thoughts and behaviors, right? Everything you're saying to me makes 100% clear sense around thoughts, because I feel like as you're building these like all the exercises you're doing are in your thoughts, and they can help you guide your thoughts. My questions kind of revolve around the other two pieces. The first was behaviors, which we just started talking about, because when it comes to behaviors, at least the way I kind of look at it, behaviors kind of have a a two way interaction, right? Yes, we can. We can manage our own behaviors, but what matters for behaviors is how they're perceived. And so self awareness is tricky, because you can sit in a room and think about it all day, all you want, but if that's not how you come off to others, you completely lack the understanding of that behavior and how it impacts impacts others. And so you kind of answered that question there. My other piece was around emotions. I think this is really interesting, because I think it's maybe a kind of a old school way of thinking of things. But there's the mind and there's the heart, and they seem to, you know, there's a lot of lot of sayings and stories and texts around how these two can be at odds. I always like to say that you have, like, your your logic mind, and you have your heart or your emotion mind, and meeting in the middle of those two is like where wisdom really, really lives. So I'm curious how you know, building these habits, especially saying the mentally strong leader, to me, it's such there's a there's an oxymoron playing here, maybe at a high level of using like mental strength to overcome or to regulate emotional needs or issues and things like that. Can you speak a little bit to that, that connection and whether, like, what kind of, what kind of synergy is that?

Scott Mautz  
Yes, especially, excellent question. Jeff, especially with the emotional portion of mental strength, right? And by the way, mental strength is broader than just emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence, of course, is, you know, being skilled enough to get your emotions to work for you versus against you. Think of emotional intelligence as a slice within the broader umbrella called mental strength, which has to do with not only emotions, but thoughts and behaviors. And it's not just fortitude and resilience, it's also confidence and boldness, decision making, go focus and your ability to message positively to the troops. But you know, back to your questions about emotions, it makes it even out of the three emotions, thoughts and behaviors, which are what we self regulate when we're mentally strong, more than the other two. Even, I think emotions require systems and frameworks to help you, because they're emotions, and we're human beings, and we often respond in the moment to things happening, and when you have systems and frameworks in place. That's part of mental strength. That's the strong part of mental strength, that chain that ties you to what you want to do, the systems or the frameworks. And I'll give you an example, a perfect example, in the mentally strong leader. Let's say you take that mental strength self assessment, Jeff, and you determine, Okay, one of the things that I want to work on is this ability to navigate my negative emotions in the moment, and this happens to all of us, right? Jeff, where we can get in a heated situation for whatever reason. Maybe we disagree with someone, maybe we're really frustrated with someone, maybe they're really pushing back, and things aren't going well, right? If you could have a system to help control those emotions, that's part of mental strength. And here's an example of a system in mentally strong leader, there's a tool I call the redirect rhythm. I've been teaching it for years. It's been proven and validated over and over again. And here's how it works, just a couple of simple steps. If once you practice this. Jeff, I'm telling you it really, really works. Imagine you're in a moment where negative emotions are getting in the way. If you want to navigate that to a productive outcome. There's four simple steps, and they happen so quick that once you start to practice them, you don't even have to think about this system, this framework, it just happens. The first step is first to just create space. Take a breath. Create distance from the intensity of the emotion. The idea here is to break the gravitational pull of the emotion that is dragging you somewhere that you do not want to be. It's people you often hear, Well, hey, take a breath. Cool. Down. There's a science based reason for that, because when you're when you don't do that, you're getting gravitationally pulled to a direction you don't want to be. And when you take a breath, you stop the pull for just a second, and then the next step you take is you name the emotion. You ask yourself, What am I feeling? And when you can name what you're feeling, it begins to lose its hold over you. So Jeff, in that moment you're feeling, let's say you're feeling really angry with a co worker, really frustrated, and you just stop. You take a breath. You stop letting that gravitational pull you where you don't want to be. You name the emotion, okay, I am feeling really angry right now. Now that you've named what it is that you're feeling of very quickly to yourself, that anger can begin to lose its hold over you, because you've identified what that thing is that's thrown you off course, you go to the next step very quickly, which is to reassess. Instantly, you just say, Okay, what's really happening here? What's happening is, as you're taking a breath and thinking and collecting your thoughts, right? And as you've you've named the emotion I'm feeling angry, you reassess, okay, well, what's really happening? Well, what's happening is, and I'm making up this scenario, Jeff, what's happening is I'm really angry at my coworker because they don't agree with me, and I know I feel like I'm really right, and I'm passionate about this point, then you go to the final step of the redirect rhythm, which is simply to redirect and to say, Well, what's next? How do I and this is key, respond now versus react. When we react, it tends to be emotive. When we respond, it tends to be action based, and you can take the action towards a more productive outcome. So if you can create space, name the emotion, reassess and redirect. You have created a structure and a system to help regulate your emotions, and the mentally strong leader is filled with tools like that to help you do that, because, like we establish up front. Jeff, this ain't easy, but it can be if you build the habits,

Jeff Ma  
that's awesome. I love that. Pretty, pretty psyched right now, because I'm writing on my list right now. I'm going to go, I want to take this assessment. I want to, I'm going to go through these things and start but this sounds like there's a lot of tools that I'm going to have to start practicing to build these habits. Because, I mean, you're, you're selling the heck out of them here in terms of, of convincing me that this is, this is some good stuff. So I appreciate it. I wanted to, you know, make sure that our listeners are given the opportunity to understand, like, what, what they can do next. First and foremost, what can they can do right now today, besides going to get the book and all those other things. But where can they start for themselves? But also, if you'd like to build on that, can you just, you know, you've mentioned the book, but how else can they learn more, get in touch with you or or, you know, find out more on this journey here?

Scott Mautz  
You bet they can also, of course, you can find the the mentally strong leader@scottmouse.com and I know that'll be in your show notes. It's mautz.scottmouse.com but also, hey, if you want to get started right away, I put together a gift for your listeners, Jeff, go to scottmouse.com/mentally strong gift. All kind of one word, scottmouse.com/mentally strong gift, and they'll be able to download a 60 page PDF I put together for your listeners that it allows them to go ahead and get started on the self assessment right now, if they want to, without even having haven't had the book yet. And then it also includes prompts and questions that will help you to get the absolute most out of the mentally strong leader, a book I've been working on for if you think, think about it this way, almost three decades. But they can get a fast start right now by going to scottmautzs.com/mentallystronggift.

Jeff Ma  
That's awesome. I'm gonna go check that out. I hope everyone's listening. We'll go check that out as well. Very, very awesome opportunity to just get started on this. So Scott, with that, I really appreciate the time you spent today. I really appreciate the wisdom you've shared, and I really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you so much.

Scott Mautz  
Thank you so much for bringing more love into the world. Jeff, it's what we could all use in business, of course, but also in life,

Jeff Ma  
absolutely. And thank you to the listeners for staying with us and tuning in as always, we hope you enjoy this. Please check out Scott's book, check out the mentally strong leader, check out love as a business strategy. For whatever reason you are here and you have not, and rate our book, rate this podcast, share with your friends all those things. Really appreciate all the support. So with that, thank you to our guest, Scott Mautz, and thank you for tuning in. We'll see you all next week.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai